Why Is WordPress So Popular for Small Business Sites?

WordPress actually did not start out as a business platform. It started out as an easy way for people to make their own blogs. Particularly during the early 2000’s, blogs were really taking off as ways for people to get content on the Internet, to make personal homepages and, for some people, to start their own businesses. Today, WordPress has been taken far beyond its humble beginnings. To understand why it’s popular as a business platform, you need to understand the concept of a content management system.

Old Days and Old Pages

When people first started using the Internet for small business, they were generally having pages custom built for them. Adding a new page required calling the programmer and having them construct a new page and changing the look of the site, unfortunately, oftentimes meant changing each individual page. This meant that having a webpage was a very costly prospect.

Content management systems provided a way for people to get around these costs and logistical hangups. Instead of having to have a new page constructed from scratch, people could construct their own page by entering the text and other content they wanted on the page in a user interface that anybody capable of using a word processor could understand. That content is instantly transferred to the correct page template upon publication.

Faster Updates

One of the other major evolutions on the Internet had to do with how search engines prioritized sites. Fresher content is still preferred by search engines. Because of that, it’s important for people to have an easy way to update their own sites. Blogging happened to provide the basic model for that. WordPress, of course, was a blogging platform to begin with. Hence, WordPress eventually became very popular as a general content management system for businesses.

Many premium WordPress themes, even professional ones, are still based around the basic blogging model that this content management system started out with. Others, however, are designed for eCommerce, for general information sites and for just about every other purpose you can imagine. WordPress remains popular with businesses because of the large variety of themes available for the platform and because, even in a much more complex world, WordPress remains very easy to use, allowing businesses to update their own sites without having to contact a programmer to handle the heavy lifting or to have new pages constructed from scratch.